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View Plans“ ”This monument is for the unknown good in our enemies. Like a picture their life began to appear: they gathered at home in the evening and sang. Above their fields they saw a new sky. A holiday came and they carried the baby to the park for a party. Sunlight surrounded them. Here we glimpse what our minds long turned away from. The great mutual blindness darkened that sunlight in the park, and the sky that was new, and the holidays. This monument says that one afternoon we stood here letting a part of our minds escape. They came back, but different. Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life. This monument is for you.
Additional quotes by William Stafford
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say. — William Stafford, “Ask Me,” <i>Ask Me; 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford</i> (Graywolf Press, January 7th 2014)
It is all right to be simply the way you have to be,
among contradictory ridges in some crescendo of knowing.
"Scars"
They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.
Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.
Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.
William Stafford, <i>Americans’ Favorite Poems</i> edited by Maggie Dietz and Robert Pinsky (W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, November 1, 1999)